Around Easter there are different holidays, in Germany for instance Friday and Monday are holidays. This gives you some time without annoying customers and colleagues asking you to do stuff. So what could you PHP geeks do when getting bored? - A good idea is to test PHP development snapshots.

Currently we have the second release candidate for PHP 5.2.6 out. Test it now with your code! We do our best to test it but we can't cover every use case so we need your testing! The simple rule is: Who doesn't test in time shouldn't complain later if their application breaks. 5.2.6 shouldn't brake anything but sometimes there are unexpected side-effects. Now we can fix them, it's harder after the release.

For 5.3 things are different. We are going to break stuff, but only with good intentions. The latest break we did is dropping the zend.ze1_compatibility_mode ini setting. That setting was broken from day one and gave lots of confusion. So test your applications in time and report unintended breaks you discover.

Of course you should always test the latest snapshots while doing your development but a few more free days might simply give you more time and a chance to give something back to the PHP project. For supporting PHP you might also read about the upcoming PHP TestFest and GSoC.